


(Heard it From a Ditch) Down By the Dam

by NorthwesternInsanity



Category: Music RPF, REO Speedwagon
Genre: Car Accidents, Drugs, Fluff, Gen, Horror, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Manchildren, Men acting like children, Offscreen Assualt, Song Inspired, crackfic, offscreen murder, trigger warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-26
Updated: 2019-11-26
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:19:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21567400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorthwesternInsanity/pseuds/NorthwesternInsanity
Summary: An escape from a bar raid after a gig one cold, rainy, October night ends head-first in a ditch.  But as it turns out, the mysterious driver that cut the car off and sent REO Speedwagon hydroplaning off the road had a plan to cover up a much darker crime.





	(Heard it From a Ditch) Down By the Dam

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the Mike Murphy era REO Speedwagon song "Down By the Dam". Written back in October for the Rockfic Halloween challenge.
> 
> *Trigger Warning* There is an onscreen car crash vividly described -if you have a history with these that would make reading this difficult, click back or proceed with necessary caution. Checking the song lyrics will give an idea of what else to expect. None of the assault takes place onscreen, nor is it described strongly, but if the lyrics themselves feel too much, I would also recommend the same as the previous warning.

The motor of the band car growled as Alan Gratzer pushed the pedal and sped down the roadway running through the middle of California along a southbound trend. 

With his steady nature, he'd been more cautious than his bandmates had encouraged on the way out of town. He checked intersections, and stopped to obey red lights -if only shift to the right lane and turn off to get around the intersection from the other side rather than waiting.

Now that they were out of the town, he'd thrown his usual caution to the wind. 

Gregg Philbin quickly turned his head from side to side, checking every hidden intersection and watching for any hazard ahead to warn of. He also had a pad of paper and a pen, but rather than working on a song, he was scribbling down the names or state highway number of every road Alan turned down, and in which direction. The further they got, the more turns they took, and the longer they drove, his concern of getting hopelessly lost grew, and his notes were their key to finding their way back to a main road, or pinpointing where they were on a map.

In the backseat, Gary Richrath watched out the left passenger window, Mike Murphy from the right side, and Neal Doughty huddled between them, groaning snide remarks of hoping that wherever the hell they were driving, they'd make it there alive with the way Alan was driving unyieldingly. That part was scary enough, and it was in the final throws of a rare California downpour -unseasonable of its kind for late October -that brought in the eerie chill of a cold front and left the road wet and slippery to boot.

Neal wasn't exaggerating either. They really didn't know where they were driving.

Since the police had crashed into the bar they'd had an early evening gig in, hollering about some marijuana bust that had taken place last week and how they were back without notice to see if the owner had cleaned up, they'd been on that road, and that was nearly half an hour ago. The table in the dressing room they'd used had been absolutely covered in it when they'd arrived, and being a bunch of rockstars, they didn't stand a chance of getting off the hook -regardless of whether they'd used it or not.

And some of them had, or had planned to and never got the chance. Some time before the cops showed up, Gregg and Neal had disappeared to the restroom, and it didn't take much for anyone to guess what they'd been up to. Even Alan and Mike knew, despite never seeing the evidence Gary did, when he got sent after them as soon as they realized they had to make a run for it.

_"I'm getting the car started -Mike, you come outside with me!" Alan all but hooked the singer under his left arm. "Gary, go get Gregg and Neal, if they're not on their way back already. Leave out the first door you guys see that isn't alarmed. Move it!"_

_Gary made for the narrow hallway leading toward the restrooms, and the side door that led to the dressing room they'd been in and out of earlier in the evening. Neal and Gregg, looking relaxed and unaware of the commotion, met him halfway. The latter discreetly held a foil blunt in his hand, but with the thought on his mind, Gary could have seen it from across the entire building._

_"Put that out and away before we're busted! You already checked we had everything packed up in the car, right? -come on, we're outta here."_

_"Gary?" Gregg obediently smothered the blunt out and tucked it up his sleeve._

_Neal's expression and tone both flattened with annoyance as he began jogging after Gary toward the side exit, leaving Gregg no choice but to follow._

_"I take it the party's over. Alright, what's this about?"_

_"The cops are coming in good and pissed off over something that happened here last week -we DO NOT want to be here while they're here!"  
_

That was approaching half an hour ago. And Alan had been doing 80 for the better half of it.

"I sure hope we didn't leave anything behind; it'll be hell getting back there," murmured Gregg, continuing to scribble notes.

"This is the kind of unexpected stuff why we always pack the car up after these smaller gigs, _before_ we hang out. We should be fine." Alan didn't so much as glance to Gregg, or show the slightest sign of concern.

"By the way, Alan, where are we going?" Gary craned his neck and looked out the front apprehensively for any familiar landmarks. "I'm pretty sure if they were going to follow us, we've lost them by now."

"We'd better go for close to an hour to be sure."

Neal winced as Alan swerved to avoid a dead skunk on the road. "All this after a small gig between tours. How'd we get caught up in this any-?"

Mike ducked sheepishly against the right window. "Well, I think most of us aren't exactly innocent in it-"

"Ah-ah! We're NOT pointing fingers or playing the blame game," said Alan sternly, not taking his eyes off the road once. "Don't even think about it. We were all there, we all had it whether all of us were gonna use it there or not, or whether we already had, or if we brought in anything else -doesn't matter! We're all in trouble. Everyone here has their part in it, and we're not questioning who's more at fault."

"Seriously, Alan, we're pushing fifty on the number of turns we've made, and we're getting into country road territory," Gregg complained. "I think we've lost them."

"Well, it's not like these kinds of roads are anything new to us, and I don't want to take the main road where-"

Suddenly, a dark car flashed out in front of them, seemingly squealing and spinning out onto the road out of nowhere, and came to a sudden, brake-checking stop. 

Alan slammed on the brake with another screech of tires to keep from plowing into it.

Neal shouted from the backseat, enraged. 

"Some jerks need to go straight to HELL!"

Unfortunately, with no way of knowing for sure if the cops weren't still on their trail despite his best efforts, Alan couldn't even retaliate with the horn. 

Retaliating was the least of his worries, though. The car fishtailed on the wet pavement from his reflexive brake slam, and it wasn't regaining traction immediately upon releasing the pedal, but rather, trying to drift into a slalom across the roadway.

"Watch out- HOLD ON!"

Having driven between many a gig in the Midwest, and through many winter storms and icy roads, Alan knew the rules of how and how _not_ to handle a car that was spinning out on a slippery surface, including when it was safe to fight it, and when it was better to just go with the direction of the car and redirect it once it was done spinning.

Unfortunately, this road was a narrow one. One lane in each direction, and no paved shoulder. Just a three-foot strip of soggy grass with sparse gravel spread on top before the ground plunged into a deep, wide ditch. On the opposite side, the ground was mostly flat along the gradual incline across the road, and it gave way to a tall grass field protecting a corn field behind it. They were hydroplaning right toward the ditch, and Alan knew that trying to turn the car away from it at that moment would have sent it flipping multiple times, possibly still toward the ditch he wanted to avoid, thanks to the incline allowing the opposite side to drain toward it.

So he let the car make its complete, three hundred sixty degree spin, bracing himself for impact as he cried out a warning to his bandmates, and when it circled around, the nose was off the side of the road, and they were sliding straight down into the chasm.

Gary bounced two feet out of his seat and slammed his head on the ceiling of the car. Mike had a chance to reach out and grab onto the back of Gregg's seat to hold himself down, but the force instead exacerbated being slung forward, then backward as the car came to an abrupt stop in the ditch.

Being wedged between them in the back middle, Neal didn't go far beyond having his knees collide with the backs of the front seats, but as Gary came down and Mike rocked back into his seat, he got elbowed in the ribs on both sides. 

A quick block with his own elbow saved him from getting slammed in the nose by Gary's shoulder too.

"Thanks a LOT," he yelled.

"Ouch, dammit," groaned Gary, rubbing his head and neck, too preoccupied by the impact he'd had with the ceiling to even register his impact with Neal.

Unable to speak, Mike wheezed for air instead. He'd knocked his wind out over the back of Gregg's seat.

Up in the front, the car had seat belts new to its model, and having chosen to make use of them for their high speed escape, Gregg and Alan knew just how hard they slammed down into the ditch by the sheer force of the straps against their bodies. Gregg swore to himself that he could feel the heat rising along the diagonal line across his chest, and he could imagine the skin tinting pink, then darkening to purple and black as blood pooled underneath.

Braced against the steering wheel, Alan didn't feel the belt slam his ribs quite as much as he felt the contracture across his abdomen. But he knew to release his white-knuckle death grip at the last second before the force of impact on his wrists landed him with broken bones. Instead, his hands slid over the steering wheel and scraped over the top of the dashboard with the forward momentum, leaving bloody burns on the thin skin below the heels of his hands.

The windshield cracked, and a few shards of glass sprinkled the dashboard.

The piercing noise effectively silenced everyone as the car finally settled with the back end up a good thirty degrees from the bottom of the ditch, where the front fender was crunched in with steam rising from the radiator. 

Then Alan came out of his own shock and yelled out as he shook the glass off his hands.

"Yeah, that driver can fucking go to hell for pulling THAT shit, once we can be sure that WE aren't going WITH them!"

Gregg sucked in a gasp at the sudden burst of fury. Their drummer was so level-headed and fair tempered, it was already a shock to hear him swear more than once in one sentence, let alone with malice toward another person.

Unfortunately, the sudden, deep inhale did not agree with the explosions of tingling pain in his ribs, and he ended up choking on it and going into a coughing jag that left him clutching his side in agony. The sheer look on Gregg's face from his double take, paired with the rush of adrenaline and the slapstick outcome set Gary and Mike off howling with laughter until they were clutching their sides too.

Neal managed to hold back, until he couldn't help smirk when Alan's cheeks went pink.

"You seriously didn't expect him to be a little on edge this once, Gregg?"

"Lawdy!" cried Mike. "Whooo, that was something else!"

"Gary, Mike..." Gregg was breathless as he pulled off his seatbelt and gently pressed his calloused fingertips to his ribs. "God damn it. That was _not funny!"_

"Well, thanks for not telling _me_ with them for once," Neal grumbled. "Even if I might have found it funny, it isn't after getting _pummeled_ back here!"

"No one's saying it is." Alan tried to maintain a semblance of calm, but fear tinged his voice, and his brow was visibly creased in the faint light of the moon through the windshield. "Is everyone okay?"

Gary snorted. "What a question! I don't know, but I've been better."

"Well, now that we're wedged in here, we're not in complete sphincteral distress and didn't suffer consequences from it..." Neal left his snide remark unfinished to make his point.

Alan sighed, rolled his eyes, and shifted around in his seat to get a look in the back. 

"I _mean_, is anyone _hurt?"_

"I'll sure be feeling the whiplash in the morning," Mike offered, "but other than that, now that I can breathe, I'm feelin' pretty good for what we got here."

Gary shrugged and moaned in discomfort as he did. 

"Hit my head on the ceiling -that wasn't cool. I think I'd know if I snapped my neck though. Guess I'm in the same boat as Mike."

Alan fixed Neal with a look of concern. "You said you got pummeled -when you guys fell back down in the seat?"

"We elbowed him falling back down -that's our bad." Mike finally turned to Neal with a regretful look.

"I'm _alive."_

"Alright, you _grump._ Gregg, I saw you -lift up your shirt for me. I want to make sure it didn't cut you. The seat belt got me good enough, and you didn't have anything to brace against."

Gregg hissed in pain as he lifted his arms up at his sides to pull the hem of his shirt up. The seat belt had not cut into his skin, but visible imprints and contusions marked the exact shape of the shoulder strap across his chest. His lower left rib was marked with a forming, darker bruise as the spill from deeper, busted vessels worked slowly to the surface.

"I think I'd have a harder time breathing than I am if I broke my ribs, but it hurts like hell, trying to sit up straight or breathe in all the way."

"We're gonna get you checked once we get out of here," said Alan sternly. "Doesn't matter if it's just bruised; you took a beating. That's serious enough."

Gary caught a glimpse from the backseat and winced as Gregg pulled his shirt back down.

"Gary, I think we'd better have you checked too, just because you bounced up on the ceiling so hard -you might have whiplash a little more severe than-"

"_Hold it,"_ Neal cut in. "Real quick; before we're toast. I _don't_ smell smoke or gas. Can everyone else say the same thing? 'Cause if you can't, I think we'd better get out of here pretty darn quick instead of comparing wounds and talking about what we're gonna do once we _are_ out."

Mike rolled down the back window, and Gary shuddered and moaned at the screech emitted from the door track.

"-or you could be concussed," Alan finished in a low mutter.

"I can't," said Mike

Alan glanced to the dashboard. He'd turned the engine off, but hadn't turned the ignition all the way out, and some of the gauges were still reading. The engine temperature had gone down, even with the radiator visibly busted.

"I don't smell it either, and it's not reading overly hot. Probably a good thing I turned the engine off when we started sliding off, or we'd be in deep shit."

"Not that we aren't already," mused Gary.

"Not that we aren't already," Alan repeated, losing his steady resolve. A glum look crossed his features, and he sank back and folded his arms over his chest.

It was then that he felt the damp, sticky feeling of blood spots forming on his shirt from his wrists -that he looked down and finally noticed the stinging he hadn't been aware of through all the commotion. Then he noticed the streaks of blood over the dashboard where he'd scraped them as his eyes drifted up to the only source of injury he could think of.

"Oh, _crap, no,_ he moaned, looking at the nasty abrasions on his wrists, knowing they'd be difficult to keep bandaged while playing drums. The motion itself would probably crack any scab that would form, and reopen the wounds too if he didn't treat them with care.

"I just smell radiator fluid. And blood. Big surprise." Gary mimed a gag at the sickly, syrupy scent of the antifreeze mixed in with the copper-like blood smell, and Mike rolled the window back up with another screech.

"Are you nauseous?" Neal looked at him, deathly serious in his eyes.

"At least not yet. Are you asking because you're worried I'm concussed, or because I'm next to you, and-"

"Both." Neal pointed to the door, not even waiting for Gary to finish his question. "If you do start feeling like you're gonna hurl, it'd better be outside the car, or there'll be hell to pay!"

"What kind of a ditch is even this deep?" Mike craned his neck to look past Gary as the guitarist quickly opened and closed the door to test that it wasn't blocked, and decided to change the subject before the suggestion got anyone else sick.

"It's not just flood control; there's some sort of grate and pump in the ground not too far from us."

"Two right turns back, remember we were going along that low road that looked kind of marshy, and we saw that sort of dam and retention lagoon?" Gregg pointed to his road notes, then pointed out his window toward the road from where they'd come. "I think that might be leading down to that, because we went along that road for awhile, then we turned right and went up that forest road up that big hill, and then we turned right again, and it opened up to this."

"Yeah, that's probably it." Alan nodded as he vaguely remembered what he'd gone screaming past while his bandmates questioned how far they should go. "Figures we'd end up with a mass drainage ditch instead of a simple one if we had to end up in one at all."

"Not just the ditch. Where are the cops patrolling the roadway?" Gregg threw up one hand -only from the elbow he kept tucked down at his side -and motioned to the roof and the road above. "I mean, we'd be in just as much trouble if we'd passed one with the way we were hauling ass, but surely, they had to have seen that other car at some point too."

"They're probably not out here, because making a second pot busting in some bar in a week and scaring a bunch of people trying to have a good time, who might have had nothing to do with the first one, is more important than being where we actually NEED them." 

Mike ranted with so much force that his face was turning red as his hair by the time he paused to breathe. He turned and looked out the back windshield, motioning to the lack of any colored lights up above, or even the sound of cars on the road above. 

It was silent up above. They might as well have been in a black hole instead of a ditch.

"See? Where the fuck's anyone now?"

"Angry much, Mike?" Neal raised his eyebrows and mocked fear as he shrank away from the angry singer and against Gary's side for protection. "That's as bitter as I've _ever_ heard you."

"I try not to get up in a frenzy, but this is stacking up into something else. It doesn't make sense HOW it even happened when we were all looking around the road."

"I know -WHERE did that car fucking COME FROM?" raged Gary, provoking Neal to flinch for real and fold over his lap, out of the range of emphatically swung arms. 

"I've been watching out the back window for passers on the left, and I know _I_ sure didn't see it, Mike."

"I didn't see it on the right either. Course, he'd have been driving in the ditch we're stuck in now, I don't see how he _could_ have come from here." Mike looked about the car and out the back windshield looking baffled.

The ditch wasn't shallow enough for a car to have driven along the side without flipping or going nose-down as they had. The rain had also turned the ground too slippery to keep from sliding down if it had been shallow enough.

"How the fuck did it-?"

"Come on, guys," groaned Gregg. "It didn't turn out in front of us; there wasn't any road for it to come out from. And we _know_ it didn't drop in out of nowhere."

"Unless it _did."_ Neal punctuated his remark by emphatically crossing his arms over his chest as he sat back up and settled hard against the back of the seat.

Alan sighed. He'd been leaning back in his seat, holding his arms up with his forearms and palms turned up and parallel to the back ceiling of the car, trying to direct his blood flow away from his wounds long enough to stop bleeding.

"Neal... This is _not_ the time."

"Yeah, if it did, maybe we'd _better_ not speculate on how. We're freaked out enough already." Mike breathed a sigh and tried to calm back down. "Whew-y! I know one thing, he got me going!"

"Damn right! He got me going too." Gary slapped the side of the door to release frustration. "Shit!"

"Pretty impressive for someone we never saw," Neal murmured.

"I didn't see it coming either. And let's not blame anyone for not seeing it. If you have to blame someone in here, blame me." Alan pointed to himself, looking guilty. "I was driving fast and not looking as well as I could have. Even though I had you all looking for the situation tonight, I should be looking too."

"If I remember right, I don't think they had their lights on, so it'd have been hard to see them coming anyway. Just blame them." Gregg shook his head. "Mike's right -it had to have come from the left, but it's not our problem that someone's enough of a doofus to drive out here without lights. I don't know how _they_ could see, let alone us."

"We're not blaming you, Gratz; come on. I would have gunned it even faster. And with the other car, it's not like we have much of a better answer." Gary switched to Neal's defense, if more out of frustration than supporting the point. "It might as well have dropped out of the sky, for all we know."

"Thanks for not dragging it over my head -and you all probably will later, 'cause I've said it now," said Alan. "That's okay too. Forget it though, okay? I don't think it helps us much in any case to figure out where it's from or who it was when it's gone, so forget about it. Hit and run. That's the best answer we have."

"Yeah, Alan, I got a better question for you," challenged Neal. "Since we're stuck here, how are we going to get _out?"_

"I don't think the doors are blocked. Mine worked, at least; we just gotta ease out and climb back up." Gary didn't seem too worried. "I don't think it'll be too bad once we get one of us up. It just might be a bit slippery for the first one of us."

"I'm tallest, so I should probably get out first and help pull you guys up. At least I have the best chance of any of us getting up there myself. We're like, six feet down, at least -_oh, GOD,_ that could have been _so much worse_ than it was." 

Realization struck hard as to just how far they'd fallen, and Alan's short-lived stint in engineering classes -even with poor grades as drums took priority over his studying -was more than enough for him to grasp the physics behind a heavy car falling down a steep drop. He raised trembling hands to his face and covered his eyes as he sucked in a deep breath and huffed out a sigh.

Gregg fingered his ribs again and murmured softly. "We're lucky we didn't pitch through the glass up here if that's how hard we went forward. As bad as the seat belt crushed me, I'm kind of glad it did."

"Yeah, we're lucky we didn't get killed, period." Gazing to the dark floor of the car, Mike sighed glumly. "If we rolled down, there's no question-"

_"Don't_ plant images -we're _already_ gonna have nightmares!" When Alan pulled his hands away from his face, he had two bloody patches on his cheeks from his wrists.

Neal pointed to Alan. "Speaking of having nightmares..."

Chuckling, Gary mimed smearing his own cheeks. "Yeah, Alan, you just turned yourself into something out of a horror film."

_"Shit,"_ he growled, glancing to his bloody wrists again. "Like I said, we're already gonna have nightmares over how much worse that could have been."

"It could have been a lot worse, but it's pretty bad as it _is."_ Gregg flipped open the glove compartment, noting that the dashboard had collapsed inward enough that the drawer was entirely on his knees when he opened it. From inside, he grabbed a roll of paper towels they kept on hand when traveling to small gigs.

"Mike, reach in the back and get that roll of tape -the stuff I use when I get a skin split, please. You're still bleeding pretty good, Alan. We gotta get you cleaned up before it looks like a crime scene in here."

"Uh, considering how we wound up down here, I'd say it already does." Neal passed the roll of protective tape from Mike to the front.

"And if it is, leaving a trail of blood around won't do us any favors, that's for sure." Gregg sighed and sucked in air through his teeth with pain afterward as he folded up wads of paper towels. He taped them around Alan's wrists to form makeshift bandages.

"Anything else you all need?" Mike was still up on his knees, leaning over the backseat into the cargo area.

_"Please_ tell me, are there any pain killers back there?" After releasing Alan's hands, Gregg folded his own together and mimed begging, letting his expression give way to the agony he was in.

"Only aspirin in the kit. That'll do more harm than help. At least until the bleeding stops, you gotta wait."

"Damn it, that's what I was afraid of." Gregg turned himself forward again and leaned his head into his hands, trying to be as still as possible until the wave of pain settled, and resisting the urge to sigh again. As tempting as it was, he knew it'd set off more explosions in his side.

"Have we heard any other cars since we got down here?" asked Gary. "One of us probably needs to get up and signal for help-"

From up above, the sound of a a car engine turning over from a stop pierced the night. The engine gunned -not to a takeoff, but with the revving that came from a car that got pushed when it wasn't in drive.

Gary looked to Neal and Mike, and Alan turned around to look to all of them on the backseat as they raised their fingers up one by one.

_The same car_.

They'd assumed hit and run when nobody offered help after they went down, but they hadn't seen or heard it keep going once they'd spun out.

It sounded _exactly_ the same.

Through the back windshield, no light came down from above. No headlights or tail-lights tinted the raindrops on the glass.

"-or maybe _not,"_ Gary finished, silently resolving that no matter how desperate they were for help out, they didn't want it from whoever was in that car.

"Yeah, at least not right _now,_ we're not." Neal pitched his face forward into his hands and shook his head.

The moaning of the engine became subdued above as the suspension began squeaking. 

Neal supposed the car was getting jostled from the inside by people moving roughly about the interior, and he recognized the sounds that resulted from the damage of driving on terrain that the frame wasn't suited for.

"Those are cracked bushings on that car if I ever heard them," he murmured.

Mike scrunched up his face. _"What_ are they _doing_ up there anyway-?"

"Do we _really_ wanna know, Mike-?"

"Everyone in this car needs to _shut it,"_ hissed Alan. "If you have something to say, and if it doesn't have to do with keeping us safe while we're stuck here, or how to get out, it can wait. Keep your big mouth _shut."_

Gary groaned. "Guess it's a good thing Kevin's not here anymore-"

_"Enough."_

Putting heavy emphasis on the two syllables, Gregg slapped the side of his seat as he forced the second of them. He used the downward position of the car and the rear view mirror trajectory to shoot a stern glare up to the backseat. The next strike would undoubtedly be with whoever first brought up past bandmates in a negative light again.

As they went silent, they could hear muffled yelling from above. Aggressive, malicious yelling. 

The sounds of blunt objects striking solid surfaces.

Thumps and clatters, punctuated by the tormented cries of the bushings around each wheel.

Gregg's intimidating look didn't seem so intimidating anymore, and Neal exchanged glances with Mike, realizing the dirty interaction in the car was not the kind they'd suspected and joked of.

Glass shattered. The tings of shards hitting the pavement echoed the initial crash. Then the yelling was no longer muted.

Muffled cries seemed to emerge between the yelling.

Gregg gulped and slowly turned his head to look at Alan.

A scream rang out.

It was far too shrill to have come from a man, and filled with terror. 

Whoever was the lady who'd screamed had been slammed about the car interior very forcefully. More vicious yelling followed as her screams of terror multiplied between audible strikes.

Gary's face white with shock and he winced. 

Then the sound of the umpteenth scream choking off abruptly to be reduced once more to muffled cries turned it sickly blue with fear.

The car's engine roared once more, the gears ground together, and tires screeched as it took of on the wet pavement this time.

"I don't think we're in such bad shape relative to whatever's happening up there," Mike moaned, folded over his lap in fear. "Alan?"

The slipping tires on pavement turned into squawks from the bushing, squishing mud, and crackling grass and gravel as it turned off the road to plow through the field of grasses that stood several feet tall. On _their_ side of the road.

_"Shhhhh,"_ Alan whispered softly.

"We're the only other ones out here, and we're just gonna let it _happen?"_

"I wish we could go help her too, Mike," he said understandingly. "But even if we could get up there fast enough or had some weapon to stop it, I don't think it'd be wise."

"What'd they do, make us crash to try and frame us for some kidnapping and assault?" whined Gary, getting louder from his initial whimper with each word. "We're in enough trouble _already_ if they got our tags back-"

_"SHH-SSHHHHH!"_ Gregg and Neal both fired off at him, nearly in unison. If any, the slight delay and echo effect made it sound more aggressive.

"There obviously wouldn't have even been a ditch to fall into if it'd been just a few feet further," Gary moaned, muffled in his hands now with shock.

The car screeched to a stop on tall, wet grass, some ways out in the field from where they were. The sound distorted as the car began traveling downhill, and screams echoed once again as it plowed through the sea of high grass discouraging trespassers down by the dam.

_"Shhhhh..."_ A bit gentler about it, Alan started to reach back to pat Gary on the shoulder comfortingly, but then remembered the blood trickled down his wrists and thought better of it. If they'd been victims of an attempted framing, Gregg was right. Leaving a trail really _was_ the last thing they needed to do.

"They're idiots if they think framing us is gonna work, because they'll still have a tire tracks from their _own_ car running toward wherever they are. If we've got one thing working for us, though we could still get looped in as part of it if they-"

Neal's scathing mutter broke off with a gasp and shudder as gunfire rang out from far away and below. The sound of the explosion ricocheted as noise did off the surface of water.

The screams stopped.

He looked sideways and met Gary's face.

Silence.

Gary swallowed. His ashen face began turning green as he sat paralyzed in fear, along with the night itself.

Gregg lunged diagonally across the car toward the back left window, which reliably didn't squeak like the others sometimes did. 

He cranked the window down just an inch to let fresh air flow in, and immediately regretted his action upon settling back into his seat. Writhing in pain, he took fast, shallow gasps of air and buried his hands in his face.

The cold, muggy air that had been slowly creeping in through the cracked windshield began channeling in faster.

Mike muffled a sneeze over his lap at the sudden shock of cold.

_'Bless you,'_ Alan mouthed. He motioned for everyone to look and whispered low as he could.

"Let's give it a minute, make sure they're gone, and we'll go after help together and report that-"

With labored, short blasts, the engine came back to life in the distance, grunting for strength as it climbed the hill. The ground rustling in the field above once more, and this time, it sounded like it was heading straight for the ditch.

Alan pointed toward the floor of the car and flung his wrist in time to his words.

_'Now! Down! Everyone, down,'_ he mouthed. _'Right now! Down -get down! Not a sound, and don't move. Down!'_

Keeping one hand extended behind himself, he clambered over into the backseat and tossed his dark raincoat forward to Gregg.

_"You,_ stay." He motioned for Gregg to cover himself up, rather than risking further injury if his ribs were indeed broken.

Gregg slid down in the seat, careful to keep his torso straight, and tossed the coat over his head.

Neal hopped over into the cargo space, pushed a gap between the equipment, and crawled underneath his keyboard so he all but disappeared. Seeing his method, Mike followed to nestle between the drums, and cautiously shifted underneath one of Alan's cymbals to hide his conspicuous mass of curly, red hair.

Alan and Gary wedged themselves down on the floor between the backseat and the front. It was there that Gary latched onto Alan and buried his face in his shoulder. With no inhibitions of his own left, Alan grabbed Gary's hand and squeezed it as hard as he could as he stared up through the back windshield, waiting for a sign of clearance.

He watched as a dark, low sedan pulled up to the edge of the ditch. The lights were off. Just as they had been when it had first appeared.

Alan could make out blood stains on the back glass under the moonlight, and with that, he curled in against Gary to hide his own face too. He gripped Gary tighter, holding them both down from sneaking a look when they heard a car door open. 

Footsteps briefly sloshed in the soggy grass on the edge of the ditch, then the bushings whimpered as the investigator got back in the car. The door slammed, and the car backed away.

After a resumption of the squeaking suspension and rustling of grass, the sound of tires on pavement took over. The engine blasted and distorted with growing distance, and within seconds, the night went still again. 

This time, for good.

"Think it's clear?" Mike only dared to speak after he'd counted to one hundred five times over in his head.

"I _think,"_ said Gary, trying to hide how hard he was shivering as he let go of Alan and came back up.

"Let's hope." Alan crawled back over the front to the driver's seat and tried to regain his bearings. "God, that was scary."

"Understatement of the year, Gratzer," Neal deadpanned.

"I know, Neal, I don't -but what do you even call that?" he stammered. "We don't know what happened down that way -I don't even want to know. We can't _not_ send rescue down there though."

Mike hoisted himself back up over the edge of the backseat and frowned.

"So what _are_ we gonna do?"

"That's a good question," Gary forced out between clinched teeth. He swallowed hard against the spasms that were hard enough to make his stomach lurch. _"I don't know."_

"Alright, Neal. You're our avid horror novel reader." Gregg pulled the coat off his head and gingerly shifted around in his seat to look toward the back. "What should we NOT do? Maybe that's the better place to start."

"Well, in reality -as opposed to what might happen in fiction where it might be better to stay instead of leaving and getting caught in all kinds of shit -we _probably_ shouldn't stay here. That's also an understatement, if you couldn't tell. But we definitely shouldn't leave on impulse. There's a lot that could happen _without_ a bunch of supernatural shit." Neal paused and flattened his voice an octave. "Trust me, I found out the hard way in Colorado, and you all had to come dig me out of the snow."

"Not me, and Mike wasn't there," added Gregg. "We're all stuck in the same place this time though, so we don't have backups waiting in case if one rescue mission goes wrong. We gotta get it right in one try."

"We need to be even more careful about what we decide to do before we do it." Alan seemed to level then, granted a task to lock his mind in on.

Neal smirked. "Gratz, they say most people look smarter with glasses, but you've looked and acted smarter since you ditched yours."

"Y'know, Neal, I could have guessed you were gonna say something about that sooner or later. I'm just gonna be glad that's all it was."

With the snide dig he'd been waiting for the right moment to use out of his system, Neal sobered up.

"All jokes aside, if we leave the car, we oughta know where we're going. And before we leave, we need to think it through. Consider all the possible ways that going somewhere could be stupid or dangerous before doing it."

"Before we go further on that thought, maybe let's just decide where to go if something ELSE happens and we have to get out quick," Gary suggested, looking just as desperate to run right then. "That way we all know and aren't running without some sort of plan."

"Back down the road we came from," tried Gregg. "There was that gas station and little convenience store we passed before getting on this road. We can call for help."

"We're probably gonna be in trouble when we call for help," Mike warned.

Alan closed his eyes and nodded, resigned to the suggestion.

"Reality is, we're gonna have to call for help at some point, and we have to report the car accident as well as -I don't know what combination of things that was. Maybe they didn't get our tags -if we just abandon it, it's anyone's guess how they'll connect it to the crime scene down there. Getting connected to the bust is the least of our worries."

"If we have to run back that way all together, don't leave anyone running alone. Don't leave anyone off on their own, _period,"_ Neal continued. "If we have to separate to take cover or deal with whatever pops up, we have to go as two and three."

"You definitely shouldn't be with Gary or I then, because we'll both outrun you."

"Yeah, I already knew. I'll stick with Gregg, because he probably doesn't need to be running any faster than what I can sustain long-distance right about now. Mike, who do you want to run with?"

"If we all run away together, I'll go with you and Gregg. That way you all have some backup. If Gregg starts feeling weak and falling out, we'll be able to help him along."

"Thanks, Mike," Gregg murmured. "Honest. So, if that's if we're all on the run together before we figure out what we want to do..." He pulled another page from his notebook and started copying down all the turns, highway numbers, and mile-markers he'd recorded so that both running groups had it.

"...What do we _actually_ want to do?"

"Get help," said Alan, matter-of-factly.

"Get _help,"_ repeated Neal. "Same-difference. Pretty vague, but I don't think we've got much of a choice there."

"Yeah, 'cause after all that down there, if help's not out here, it's not coming on its own. They're not around listening for us, that's for sure."

"Cool it, Mike. I'm fucking serious."

Gary didn't like seeing his happy-go-lucky bandmates in such a venomous mood. To make his point, he promptly rolled down his window further, and proceeded to shiver even harder as the stream of cold air became a full blast.

Neal growled through his teeth and pulled his jacket tighter as the cold began getting to him.

"Gary, _put it back."_

"Alright you guys." Alan held his hands up, giving a full view of the dried blood tracked down his forearms. "Enough. Close the window, Gary -please. How do we want to go about getting help? We know at least some of us are gonna have to physically get out of here and go get it-"

"-but _who?_". Neal cut him off. "It's the same thing here, but some of us are staying to watch the car so no one finds it and gets the wrong idea. Nobody's going for help alone, and nobody's staying alone either. And if anyone ends up alone -which had better not happen at all -we need to make sure it's not Gregg. He'll be the most vulnerable of us if anything does happen."

"Let's just keep him here," Alan turned and held his finger up to him "-UNLESS you _want_ to get out and go for help. If you think standing up and moving is going to be more comfortable than sitting here-"

"Oh, no." Gregg shook his head. His eyes bugged out as though the mere thought gave him pain. "Unless we all have to evacuate, if I can stay right where I am until someone comes to get us, that is a-okay."

"So you're staying. _I'll_ go. And I need at least one other with me. For the same reasons why Neal said he's running with Gregg, I don't think he's coming."

"No, I'm staying with him."

"Then that leaves Gary and I to go with Alan. I'm cool with that." Mike sat up, ready to exit the car right then and there.

"You're not leaving this car with that mop of red hair," Gary warned, reaching across Neal to grab his shirt sleeve. "Not if you don't want to get noticed."

"Shit, that's a point." Defeated, Mike sank back in his seat.

"Do we have the option to be choosy with that right now?" asked Gregg. "Remember, _nobody's_ leaving alone, and nobody can be left alone."

Silence fell, and Neal snorted as it left the sound of crickets chirping in the field.

"You all might wanna remember what I said and think that through," he mused.

"Gary and I are the most athletic of us," Alan started. "I wasn't saying you couldn't hang with it or that you can't run when you want to, Neal, but you said it right first -Gregg needs to stay with _you_. I don't like the idea of having you guys here either, but at least there are places to hide -further back down the road, you'd be stuck in the open for awhile.

"Well, I wouldn't mind getting out of here," said Gary, shuddering again. "But I guess leaving the most vulnerable sitting alone isn't so great. Mike can run quick enough, but he's not really a fighter. I can be if it comes down to it -I guess you're right, Neal. I'd better stay here with you guys, and that means Mike has to leave the car -there's not a choice. Sorry about that a second ago, Murph."

"It's fine, Riff-raff. We're all a bit freaked out right now."

Neal pointed to Mike. "And _that's_ why we gotta stop and think before we do something stupid."

"There's plenty of places to hide and take cover around here, but I'm hoping by the time we're out in the open, we'll get to a place quick, and that we'll be away from whatever the heck's going on." Alan squinted in thought. "I think that wooded hill we drove up -before we turned onto this road -that's where the gas station was, in that clearing. Shouldn't be too far back once we get to the turn to this road -_which_ could still be a ways, as fast as we were going."

"Tough noogs." Neal shrugged. "If that's the closest place we got, it's good as any -better than trying to look where we don't know in the dark."

"Can't be any worse than back home in the Midwest," suggested Alan. "It's far few in between there. Well, we'd better leave now and get to it, 'cause it's still gonna be awhile as it is."

"One more thing -and this is more of a common sense thing. But some people lack it, so I'm saying it anyway." Neal waited for Alan to look right at him before continuing. 

"Once you call for help, _STAY where you ARE._ Unless there's no other option -something's exploding or on fire, or you _see_ something chasing you and you _know_ there isn't a place to hide, none of which are likely to happen -I don't _care._ Help's only gonna come where you told them to, and that's where they expect you to be. It's _your_ problem if you aren't there when they get there."

"All of which makes sense and I probably already knew -from when we had to find _you_," Alan poked. "Doesn't hurt to be reminded though. Come on, Mike; let's get out of here and do this so we _all_ can get out of here."

Mike gingerly pushed the right, back door open and stepped down into the soggy ground at the bottom of the ditch with an audible squish, eliciting horrified and nervous giggles from Gary.

"Ugh, that's disgusting, man," Mike groaned, reaching up to the front window to take two rolls of quarters for the phones, and a flashlight that Gregg pulled from the glove box. "And it's over my ankles. I guess that'll tell you what you're in for soon enough. It looks thicker on your side; make sure you don't get stuck."

"Yeah, be real careful when the time comes, Gary -I gotta be careful right _now."_

Alan opened his own door and surveyed the mud on the left, pointing toward the end of the ditch where the road drains poured in, all to be channeled underground to the downhill dam. The end of the ditch, and the sight of flat land just beyond the slope at the end was infuriatingly close to the car, taunting just how close they were to not ending up in their predicament.

"Alright, Mike and I are _going_." Alan bit down on his tongue, turned away from the end of the ditch, and resisted the urge to throw a hissy fit over it. "Neal, you're holding the fort down here with Gary. Just make sure Gregg's alright."

"You need to make sure you're alright too." Gregg reached for the paper towels and the tape. "Take these. If there's an open restroom, clean those up properly so you don't get sick."

Alan carefully tucked the paper towels away in his pockets. "Maybe if I get out of here without falling, in which case, those are done." He eased his legs out slowly and leapt around to the front of the car, careful so not to burn himself on the residual steam around the hood.

Gregg, Neal, and Gary turned to watch as Alan and Mike walked along the lower slope of the ditch to a point where it was less soggy and more shallow. Alan hauled himself up the side first, laying his forearms down on the ground in front of himself for balance and traction while Mike guarded him from behind. Then he sat on the edge of the pavement, seeing the road clear, and helped pull Mike up.

"Wise of them to go up there, and not a bad mechanism -if his arms weren't cut open," Neal mused. "If we gotta get out of here before we see them again, that's where we're going."

"Better hope the fields across the road draining to here weren't fertilized with shit," Gary spat. "Like they are back home!"

"If they were, better hope he'll have the chance to clean his wounds out, 'cause now he REALLY needs to." Gregg dug through the glove compartment again and passed another flashlight to the backseat.

"For if we gotta leave too?"

"Why else, Gary?" Neal sighed and watched as Mike and Alan moved out of sight. "If we leave before they're back, you're climbing across and getting out the right with me."

Gary switched on the flashlight and aimed it around the backseat, then moved it to the front. 

The beam revealed the extent of the blood smears on the dashboard, on the steering wheel, and the gear shift.

Gregg released a sigh with great caution, looking at the blood, and up to the edge of the ditch where the criminal's car had stood threateningly just minutes ago.

"So much for not leaving a trail..."

Alan and Mike were well off down the road, walking swiftly down the left lane. The trail of muddy footsteps they'd come up from the ditch with had finally faded on the pavement, along with the urge to run, as they'd realized it would be better to save their energy in case they really had to run.

Not far into their initial trot, Mike spotted a section of trampled grass and ruts in the ground emerging from the left side of the road.

"They parked in the grass then," said Alan. "It makes sense now."

"That's where they came from. It wasn't from another road."

Now, Mike kept his eyes up ahead, watching for any cars coming up toward them. Without impending whiplash, Alan frequently turned to check behind them in the right lane and announced whether or not it was still clear to jump into, should they need to dodge an oncoming car.

From the time they'd set off on foot, traffic had been eerily non-existent.

They kept their watch up until the tall-grassed fields with rows of corn stacked behind the grass guard went away on the right, leaving a clearing all around. The ditches leveled out on the left, and Mike and Alan moved to walk along the short grass.

They'd been walking what felt like hours, but a glance to his watch revealed to Alan it'd barely been over half of one.

Mud squished underfoot, until the ground became harder and more compacted. Trees began to line up on the opposite side of the road as they approached the wooded region they'd passed through.

The beams of the full moon cast down at an angle through gaps in the leaves, like spotlights down on the pavement. The wind was rustling the leaves so shadows flickered, and the sound of their footsteps faded to nothing below. 

It was dream-like, heading into the light. Seemingly unreal.

Enough that Alan began to question if it wasn't real, and if it was a dream, or some hallucination that preceded death.

Without much conscious thought, and before his inner voice of steady reason could kick in and tell him otherwise, as it ordinarily would have, Alan reached his hand out with his thumb and forefinger extended. Locking onto the back of Mike's arm, he delivered a wicked pinch through the thin, draping fabric of his sleeves. Not only did he grasp strong enough to leave a bruise later, but he dug his fingernails in so that two opposing crescent marks were left behind, even with the protective layer.

"WHAT THE-? _-OUCH_, man! Jeez!"

Mike recoiled from Alan, fast enough to make Alan jump back in fear too as they went speeding back into reality. 

Once he caught his breath and regained his senses, Mike looked him over as he clutched his chest in fear. 

"What'd _I_ ever do to YOU? Are you _feeling_ alright?"

No sooner than silence fell behind Mike's exclamation, save for a bunch of chirping cicadas, did Alan's reason kick in. A crestfallen look flooded his face and he pinched the bridge of his nose.

"I'm sorry, Mike. I know that was stupid. I don't know _what_ made me think- I guess I was _really_ hoping we're just stuck in some whacked-out, lucid nightmare and that we could get out of it. Sorry, dude."

Mike seemed to deflate a bit as the angry adrenaline left him.

"Alright, I gotcha. I forgive you too, 'cause I probably flipped more shit than I usually would have, and I get where you're coming from. Just _don't_ do it again. It's not a dream, because if it was, we'd BE awake now. That HURT."

"There's the road sign up ahead." Alan pointed as they began walking again and it came into view on the left between branches. "It can't be far now."

The trees were thicker overhead as they made the turn back onto the road they'd last turned from. The moon no longer cast any light through, and street lights remained entirely absent. What had been an uphill stretch on the way forward was a downhill cavern of trees on the way back.

The crickets and cicadas were louder. The sound of footsteps on pavement was now completely drowned out, and neither Alan nor Mike had any sense that they were truly walking and not floating down the path.

An owl moaned overhead, and Mike shuddered. This time, when Alan held out his hand, it was level with his own rather than heading for his arm. He grabbed it and locked on tight.

"I don't think we'd better put the flashlight on here," he whispered.

"No, I don't think so either." Maybe on an open road, but with so much woodland, Alan didn't want to think of what else besides owls was there with them. "Funny, when it's so dark that we need it most, it's not safe to use. Or that in the car it didn't seem that dark, but then that was with headlights."

"It's just at the base of the hill," Mike whispered, repeating it a few times to keep both of them grounded as they blindly inched down the hill, using the edge of the pavement against the soles of their shoes as a guide.

They could see the light emanating from the tiny convenience store and gas station from behind the trees at the bottom of the hill, and it was the sight that did them both in. Alan and Mike sprinted down the rest of the hill, letting shoes loudly clop against the pavement, not caring who or what might hear it.

"There's the phone!" Mike cried out, pointing to the line of three perches on the side of the building.

"Not that loud! Come on, let's jump on it." Alan let go of Mike's hand and dug one of the rolls of quarters out of his pocket, breaking it open. As they came up to the phones and paused, panting heavily, he doled a few out to Mike.

"This doesn't look..." Breathless, Mike pointed to the bottom of the phone cord on the left-most perch instead of describing what he saw. Where the cord connected at the bottom of the housing, the insulation was dry-rotted, and frayed wire-fibers showed.

"Yeah, let's work with the other two. There's no point in trying it if the others work." Alan picked up the right-most phone, which had a push-button dialer and looked to be in remarkably new condition. A dial-tone pierced the stillness of the night around them.

He sighed, feeling that it had startled him more than it ought to have.

"Alright, this one works for sure. Mike, you call 911." Alan looked at the bottom shelf of the phone perch housing, where a faded label listed a few local numbers he could make out when he held the flashlight over it at the right angle. "I'm gonna call the local police as a backup. We're just gonna have to hope that we got far enough away that whoever we're calling wasn't connected to what happened back there."

"I don't even care anymore either, dude." With despair-infected features, Mike turned back to the middle phone.

It looked older than the right one -which he supposed was a recently replaced unit -and dialed with the more-familiar wheel. So when he picked it up and didn't hear an immediate dial-tone, out of habit, he twisted the dial to zero to request an operator.

Holding the receiver to his ear, he heard two rings, then the click of being connected, then a crackle.

No verbal answer followed.

"Hello?" Mike gulped. "Is this 911? I've been in a car crash, and- hello?"

The thunderous sound of what he suspected was somebody blowing a full breath out against the speaker blasted his eardrum. Knitting his brow, Mike removed the receiver from against his ear and held it out a few inches, waiting for a response as heavy breathing started on the line -quiet at first, but growing louder.

"Hello?" Blindly, Mike shifted the phone to his left hand and began reaching out to the right to tap his bandmate's shoulder. "Alan, I don't like the sound of this-"

The bell in the phone hook began blasting out a full ring tone, and from the receiver sounded a mechanized chord that didn't resemble any dial tone Mike had heard. It mixed in too many notes that were too high and low, and rather than fitting together, they clashed into a discordant sound that distorted as the pitch wavered, rather than holding a steady tone.

A scream tore from Mike's throat before he could stop himself as he slammed the phone back on the hook, nearly dropping it twice before getting it to stay. The ringing silenced.

Relief sprung across his face as he started to step away, but only for a moment before terror replaced it once more. The ringing had stopped, but resting there on the hook, the rogue, mechanized tone still sounded from the receiver, echoing and amplified from the metal box around it. 

Shudders tore up Mike's spine, leaving convulsive spasms in their wake and jerking his shoulders back as an electrocution victim's did. He felt the base on every curly, red strand of hair emerging from his head grow stiff, and he screamed again, and then again, and this time, he didn't try to hold back.

"AHH! AHH! _AHH-AAAAHHH-!!!"_

Jumping backward and screaming all the way, he hit his shrill, raspy singing register as he started to trip and felt two arms -slender, but strong -grab him from behind and reach around to clasp a hand over his mouth.

"MMMPH-!"

"Shhh!-Shhh!-_Shhh!"_ hissed Alan. "Mike! _Shhhhhh!"_

Mike went silent and went limp in Alan's arms as he gave way to profuse shaking. 

The phone continued blasting out, uninhibited in the sudden quiet. Alan turned an incredulous look to the phone as if it was the spawn of Satan itself, then looked back down to Mike -still in his arms with his mouth clamped shut. 

He was white in the face and looked ready to cry as he met Alan's eyes.

"Turn it off," he begged when Alan released his mouth. _"Please,_ turn it off -turn it _off!"_

Alan slowly helped Mike over to the wall away from his object of terror before releasing him. He wasted no time going in for an attack on the middle phone then, twisting the dialer around several times to try resetting it with an ordinary number -whoever the poor soul who might have been woken up be damned! -to no avail. He tried turning it to 911. _Nothing._

Finally, he pressed his thumb down hard on the receiver hook and held it down. Seconds began stacking, and just as the agonizing noise had Alan creeped out enough and ready to put an end to the phone with the kind of roundhouse only a drummer could deal, it went silent.

He blew out a hard exhale then as he stood, still with his thumb clamped down in the space between the phone and the button, tearing his weary eyes from the perch in slow motion.

_"Mike?"_

Mike leaned on one hand against the brick wall, leaning forward to keep from fainting. His knees were shaking so hard, Alan couldn't tell how he wasn't falling down anyway.

"I don't know WHAT that was." His voice quivered through every syllable.

"Well, let's just keep quiet and do this quick so we hopefully don't find out." Alan pointed to the edge of the parking lot where a few gravel chunks were spread under the asphalt. "Pick me up one of those rocks. I'm gonna shove one between the phone and the switch and make sure it stays off. Forget this one. I know my phone works."

Mike kept a weary eye toward Alan as he shakily abandoned the side of the building and went for a piece, refusing to trust looking away even when Alan promised he wouldn't let go of the phone until he got back. Only after they had the rock wedged in right did Alan return to his own phone, which he'd left off the hook, sitting on the base of the perch.

"Hello?" He asked. "Hello?" 

He was then greeted with the steady, warning beep cadence of a phone that had been left off the hook for several seconds after disconnecting. _This_ time, it was one they recognized as normal, but it didn't stop them from both jumping back at first.

"Oh." Alan put the phone back on the hook and breathed heavily when it quieted right away, as it should have. "Well _that's_ nice."

"What happened?" asked Mike.

"I was on the line with the local police. I asked them to hold on when I went to help get whatever the hell that thing is turned off, and they hung up anyway. At least I got to tell them them the station name and the road number." Alan sighed. "I'm not calling them again though. If they're already coming, they're coming. If not, I'm just gonna call the fire department, and they can send the police out there after they get us."

He wasn't sure who was more relieved -himself, or Mike -when a 911 dispatcher greeted them with the standard _'911, what's your emergency?'_

Mike read him off the road names once more from Gregg's notes, and recapped the details of the activity above the ditch. Once Alan hung up, assured that help was most definitely on the way -first to the gas station to pick them up, then to ride with them to the crash site -Mike did collapse, right down on a rain-filled pothole in the pavement.

"Of all the places to fall on this lot..." Alan shook his head, and instead of finishing, reached his hand down to help Mike up. "This place just doesn't want to play nice with you, does it?"

"It sure doesn't, dude. _Your_ phone worked, at least. Mine was possessed." He looked himself over. "Aw, great. I look like I pissed myself. I bet Neal cracks a joke about it when we tell him about the phone too."

"To be honest, I don't think any of us could blame you if you _did._" Alan blushed empathetically at the thought anyway. "I'd say let's just hope they don't care by the time we get back to them with help."

"Well, you don't have that to worry about, unless, did you-?"

"Not that I'm aware of happening, but I can't tell if when the seat belt crushed my stomach..."

Mike started to grin like a kid, and Alan trailed off and shoved him.

"Leave me _alone._ See, _now_ I got you to calm down! We just took our minds out of the ditch and put them right in the gutter." He started laughing too, feeling serotonin neutralizing some of the adrenaline racing through him, the same way it was working wonders for Mike.

"But if it reassures you, I won't tell them how bad you flipped out over the psycho-phone if we tell them what happened."

"Well, if the seat belt really did get to you, I won't tell them either." Mike brushed off the gravel sticking to his legs and walked back over to the side of the building.

"On the more serious side of that topic, I guess I should probably listen to Gregg and clean this if I can." Alan glanced to the mud-soaked, makeshift bandages on his wrists.

Mike stopped smiling as he also examined the contaminated coverings. 

"You probably should. We don't really know what was in the dirt on those fields -it might not be good. But, what if there's someone hiding out in the bathroom? And if they had to do with whatever that was on the phone?"

"What if there's not? Then if we need to hide from anything, we can get in there and stay until help arrives." Alan checked around the side of the building and found the door -and took a step backward at what looked like a bloody handprint smeared across the door.

"Or maybe not," said Mike.

Alan nodded as they both settled to lean on the front wall, waiting under the overhang beside the newspaper stands, trying to blend in.

"Or maybe not."

Back up the hill and down the road, Neal cranked down the screeching back right window part way and sopped up some rainwater with a wad of paper towels.

Gregg cracked his eyes open and moaned from where he rested in the front seat.

"What are you doing?"

Without so much as a word, Neal suddenly appeared next to him, popping his head between the two front seats.

"Nngh!" Gregg flinched and groaned as it sent another shock through his side. 

Neal sprung a rare, fully-sinister grin and snickered.

"Did I jump-scare you, Gregg? I thought that was going easy in here."

He proceeded to wipe up the blood -first off the gearshift, then he crawled onto the driver's seat and worked at the dashboard.

"I don't know if that's gonna get it all up without cleaner," Gregg warned.

"It's not. I'm probably just smearing the detectable traces around. But it's not like it wasn't already there. And it's something to do."

"It's been awhile, hasn't it?" Gregg checked his watch. He hadn't been counting minutes, nor had he checked right when Alan and Mike left, but he was pretty sure it'd been over an hour.

"Considering we were doing something around 80 when we came up here," Neal shrugged. "It was only a couple of minutes before when we saw that station, but that puts it a couple of miles back. Sure is funny how no one else has driven down here in the time they've been gone though."

"Hopefully we get help here before the police get to whatever happened there and they get the wrong idea." Gregg paused. "Gary, you're awfully quiet back there; what's going on?"

No answer.

"Oh, now what?" Neal left damp, bloody paper towels on the dashboard and crawled back over the seat to find Gary leaning against the window, curled up and asleep.

"You really think it's a wise idea to not be alert while we don't know what's happening next, Gary? Yeah, you hit your head, but you gotta _stay awake_ with us." 

He punched Gary in the shoulder, getting little more than a soft moan and a shiver.

"Gary. Wake. Up! Gregg, how are you feeling? Are _you_ at least gonna live?"

"I am feelin' a little weak," he admitted. "But I think I'm gonna be fine. I'm staying awake, and I'm calm until something else happens."

"You're probably just woozy from blood loss while stoned. Head between your knees if you have to -don't be stupid and let it get out of hand before you say something, because I'm not hauling you both out of this car if it comes to that." Neal crawled across and opened the right back window up again with another screech that made Gary flinch awake.

"What happened-?"

"Stay down, but _stay awake_," ordered Neal. He swiped his bare hand over the glass to collect cold rainwater, and proceeded to swipe it across Gary's forehead and neck, which was warm with muscular inflammation.

He winced at the cold contact.

"Headache?"

"Yeah?"

"How's your vision?" Neal turned on the flashlight and shined it indirectly toward Gary's face, causing him to squint his eyes closed.

"Let me see your eyes a minute-"

An engine came roaring into audible distance, and red lights flickered in the distance, capturing the raindrops on the back windshield.

Gary flinched and sat up, still disoriented, but returning to his guarded state.

"What's that?" he demanded.

"Hopefully help for us," said Gregg.

The horn of a fire engine blasted twice from above as brakes screeched.

"We're back, Neal!"

Alan's voice.

As adrenaline plunged, Neal exchanged a heavy-lidded glance with Gregg and collapsed across the backseat.

.........

_Four days after..._

As Gary crept into the kitchen for noontime breakfast with hesitation weighing each step, Alan scraped back his chair and headed for the stove to uncover a foil-covered dish.

Neal looked up.

"Alan, get back over here and _sit."_

"I'm just getting Gary a plate."

"Like you did for everyone else. Just 'cause we're all hobbling doesn't mean we can't do it."

Alan took a noisy inhale as he made his way back to the table with a filled plate. "Neal, this is my house; I'm the host, and Gary is my guest."

"Whatever, then, Gratzer. _Be_ that way."

"Thanks, Alan," said Gary, slowly sinking down in a chair. "But really, now that you got me, sit down."

The band was spending what they hoped was their second-to-last morning holed up together at Alan's house.

Between the injuries and the fear, they'd decided it was best to stay together and look out for each other in the days immediately following the accident. Once the pain and stiffness from being slung around the car set in for everyone, it was difficult enough to limp between adjacent rooms, let alone through their own houses alone, so the idea had been they'd all help each other.

Being a frequent host, Alan's providing nature didn't exactly fit the plan in all categories.

At a three hour drive South through California in the mid-morning, his house was also the nearest place they could get to from the hospital. Nobody had the energy to go any further than that

It wasn't until hours after the crash that Neal realized just how badly he'd bashed his knees on the front seats in addition to absorbing the shock of his bandmates' impacts. By the time they were headed out to the rental car they'd requested at the crash site, he was relying on a gallop-like limp that minimized the joint motion while walking.

Gregg's ribs were cracked, but none were shifted out of place. The doctors warned that his deep muscle bruises might take over a month to fade, but with proper care and caution, his ribs would heal on their own. With elastic bandages wrapped around his torso, he was stuck with little means of pain mitigation beyond Tylenol and ice. He'd have to sit down for any jamming out on his bass for the next two weeks.

Having only received minor bruising, per result of his quick bracing on the back of Gregg's seat, Mike was pronounced okay to use aspirin to treat his whiplash pain. The only order he had was to take it easy for the next few days, which was somewhat easier in company at Alan's. Having tweaked his back with his backward fall in the parking lot, he accompanied Neal with his own awkward limp pattern.

Gary was prescribed similar orders to Mike, but had to wear a neck brace for the first two days. His whiplash was much worse from the impact with the ceiling, and he indeed had a low grade concussion. By the time they got to the hospital and all adrenaline had worn off, it presented itself fully. Headache, nausea, and fatigue were the worst of his symptoms, but he showed enough in his subdued state of exhaustion for the doctor to warn Alan and Neal to 'expect a crazy person' for a few days.

Neal was dismissive of it at first. _"Oh, that's great. At least we could say he's crazy already in some ways."_

Afterward, Gary's mood swings the first day back at home -lying flat on his back, too sore to attempt lifting his head up while in the brace -were almost as scary as the scene of the crash itself.

Better yet, half way through that day, Alan began running a high fever. 

He'd had his wounds cleaned properly by the paramedics, and again at the hospital. But when a crawling sensation of pain started up his arms from his wrists and he started struggling to form a grip on any object he tried to handle while going about his hosting duties as close to normal as he could, an uneasy feeling settled in his stomach.

Over the bathroom sink, he pulled back the bandages to reveal angry, purple and red streaks halfway up his forearms, outlining the inflammation spreading up his veins.

When Mike hobbled in to see if he was okay that time, they _both_ freaked out.

After confirming a second murder hadn't taken place in the house at the request of Gary's panicked cries, Neal drove Alan straight back to the hospital, where his blood tested positive for Gram negative bacteria. This time, he had to stay through the night to knock the infection down with antibiotics through an IV.

Neal happily volunteered to stay with him as an escape from the house. Not that he had much of a choice as the only one who could look at the state of Alan's arms without freaking out.

As a gag, Gregg and Mike sprawled out in the front hallway right before they got home to tease Alan. They'd survived a twenty-four hours without his extensive host care, if with a small struggle.

As Alan was now finding out over breakfast two days later, not without the delivery of a court invitation either.

As it turned out, Gregg had to pay a small fine, because the blunt he'd hidden up his sleeve broke apart. It ended up left behind in the parking lot, as well as in their car at the secondary crime scene.

"And you told Gratz not to leave a trail!" Gary scolded with a wince. He was now free of his neck brace, and didn't go flipping between giggling, swearing, and crying and hugging in a matter of ten minutes, but excessive noise still shocked his ears, and his neck was plenty stiff.

Careful to not jerk his shoulders too fast, he pointed at Gregg and Alan.

"As long as either one of you are with us, the number one rule in this band from here on out is gonna be 'no leaving a trail', got it?"

"Guys, Gregg cracked ribs. He's been punished enough without you dragging it over his head," warned Alan, though knowing that the joke about not leaving a trail would follow the band for a long time to come, even if he did eventually see an end to it before he saw an end with the band.

_"You_ had a septic shock, Alan," Neal scolded. "I think that's pretty serious too!"

"It was an early sepsis, not shock," Alan corrected. "Yeah, it hurt like hell and it could have gotten to that if I'd waited any longer to be seen, but it didn't, and I was healthy enough that they knocked it back quick. Like the car, it could have been worse, but now that it's over, let's just be glad it wasn't."

"That was traumatic enough already," Gary groaned. "We got lucky."

"I don't think the other victim was so lucky." Mike hobbled down the stairs into the kitchen, holding a newspaper folded open to the crime report page.

"See, now _there's_ something to talk about," said Neal. "What'd you find for us?"

Mike had barely started to pull out a chair next to Neal, when Gary scraped his over on the other side, sidling up to Mike as he sat down. Gregg promptly followed, slightly behind in action as his injury hindered him.

Alan put his coffee mug down and abandoned it on the counter as he made his way over to the table. So curious to have answers for the terror they'd heard, he didn't even pause to make Mike a plate before gathering around and leaning in over Neal's shoulder.

"Victim didn't make it." Gary sighed. "Would we be jerks to write a song about it?"

"More disturbing lyrics have been written -and I'm sure many more will be," Gregg reasoned. "We're fine."

"According to this, she was loaded with hallucinogens when it happened." Mike pointed to the autopsy line noting cause of death. "Probably wouldn't have made it even if she hadn't been shot."

"They still don't know if she took them, or if they slipped it to her though." Alan stood back up and went back to the stove. "Though I'd guess the latter."

"After all that?" Gregg looked over toward him. "If you didn't, I'd have to ask what you got high on that I didn't."

"Septicemia," quipped Neal, pointing to Alan as he brought Mike a plate. "From a visit from old Sal, except in his veins instead of his stomach."

"Sal?" asked Mike. "What, another hallucinogen?-"

"No." Gary snickered. "Sal. What, you don't know Sal? Salmonella."

_"Salmonella,"_ Neal deadpanned. "And probably _E. coli_ too. Just remember, we all tracked through it on our way out."

"And that's why all our shoes are in a bag outside so we don't leave a trail of it through the house," Alan fired back. "Though, we're lucky the suspect's tires left a trail clear enough to prove us innocent in that mess."

"Yeah, speaking of them leaving a trail, did they get the killer?"

All laughter died out and the kitchen fell silent as Gary glanced back down to the paper.

"What?"

"...Still on the run."


End file.
